Category: Health

  • Dying for your art

    This is heartbreaking. Sculptor Gillian Genser has been slowly poisoned by the shells she used in her artworks. In 2015, I was diagnosed with heavy-metal poisoning. Doctors found high levels of arsenic and lead in my blood, the result of chronic exposure. The water where the mussels grew was likely contaminated from industrial waste, and…

  • Advice I have been given by mental health professionals

    It’s world mental health day today, which has the worthy goal of trying to end the stigma around mental illness. But we also need to ensure that the help people ask for is actually there – and while a lot of that is about funding, it also means education. Some of that education is needed…

  • Mobile phones still don’t cause cancer

    When it comes to conspiracy theories, there are two kinds of theorists: the batshit insane, and the people who genuinely believe they’ve stumbled on a conspiracy. There was a good example of what I assume is the latter last week in The Observer, which published an astonishing piece about the link between mobile phones and…

  • “Open Your Hands, Here Is Some Light”

    This piece made me cry. Every evening when the sun starts to set, my daughter picks me a bouquet of light. The front door of our house is glass-paned, so she crouches in front of it, where lines of sun are drifting across the wood floor. She pretends to scoop something up — the motion very much…

  • Promises we can’t keep

    I blogged a few days ago about the problem with mental health services: it’s all very well to urge people to get help, but the help needs to be there for them. This excellent piece by Vic Parsons explains how the system is failing many LGBT people. People are still being left in limbo, on…

  • Talk is cheap

    The death of Scott Hutchison has lead to a lot of discussion about mental health on social media, which is good and important. But what talking doesn’t do is fix an underfunded, overwhelmed health service. So you’re sad, and you talk to your friends, and you make an appointment with your GP. That’s all good.…

  • Our fathers and sons, our lovers and brothers

    This photo made me cry. It’s #Project84 from the Campaign Against Living Miserably, which aims to reduce the number of men who kill themselves. 84 is the number of men in the UK who kill themselves every week, and there are 84 of these sculptures on the London skyline. It’s stark and beautiful in a…

  • I haven’t got lazyitis

    There’s a well known trick in the bullshit community: if you give something a scientific or medical sounding name, you can persuade some people that bullshit isn’t bullshit. It’s a technique used by quacks and scoundrels and rapacious corporations alike. Today’s example is “rapid onset gender dysphoria”, which is appearing in various right wing newspapers…

  • The drugs do work

    The BBC reports that a new study, published in The Lancet, finds that anti-depressants really do work. The study, which analysed data from 522 trials involving 116,477 people, found 21 common anti-depressants were all more effective at reducing symptoms of acute depression than dummy pills. It’s timely given the massive and largely uncritical publicity recently…

  • A bad take on good news

    Good news! Advances in diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer means fewer women (and men: men get breast cancer too) are dying! Also, men are living longer! Daily Mail: